


While You were Away

by Pyrosane



Category: Football RPF
Genre: FC Barcelona, Gen, Real Madrid CF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-04
Packaged: 2018-02-11 18:42:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2078973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pyrosane/pseuds/Pyrosane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quiet Ohio has its fair share of Indian summers. In the wake of tired AC vents and exhausted car engines, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi meet again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	While You were Away

**Author's Note:**

> Done upon request

So they both ended up there, leaking tanks in the sweltering summer heat. The man behind the counter is thick with grease beneath soiled fingernails, chipper from tin-foil wrappers making their way from the floor to his desk. The clock that hangs on plastered walls is broken.

“Long time, no see,” the man in white tries. He has driven eyes and a broad-shouldered smile, so much so that Leo almost does not notice the way he stoops, this man. It dawns on him that they knew each other once.

“How have you been, Cristiano?” Leo fights back the urge to laugh. Like the rest of them, the great Ronaldo, attacking powerhouse no. 7, had lost to age.

“Fine, fine.” But their tongues hold the same and their conversation is still not as smooth as it was in those commercials, the ones they filmed together sixty some odd years ago. That is even funnier, Leo thinks. It is the kind of scathing humor Kun would have enjoyed, the punchline something like _robot cops exist now but CR7 and I still can’t share a beer_. How fitting that some things never change. Real and Barcelona are still at each other’s throats and briefly, Leo imagines calling the man in white hermano.

He never does.

“What brings you here, to quiet little Ohio?” Leo shifts to get a better look at Ronaldo. It begins to amaze him, that they should meet here, of all places.

“I could ask you the same. La Pulga, always running around, giving our defenders hell. Why choose to stop here?”

“I didn’t want to be like Maradona.” And that shuts the man in white up, but Leo gets in a good laugh first. He raises a feeble hand and in good-humor, slaps Ronaldo’s shoulder. “I chose Ohio because Thiago did not choose football.”

Ronaldo shakes his head, tsk tsk in disapproval of Leo’s parenting. “The son of a footballer such as yourself should have become a footballer, too. It’s a shame. I was hoping to see Thiago and Junior out on the pitch one day, together. In the same jerseys.” A chimerical upturn of Ronaldo’s lips tells Leo that time worked its way into the other man’s muscles and bones but not his character. Ronaldo is still the same man he was on finetuned green horizons and behind camera flashes. How badly Leo ached to see Ronaldo and his impossible audacity, he had no idea until now. But he does not hesitate to ask him something important.

“Where would they have called home, then? Camp Nou or the Bernabeu?”

And Ronaldo laughs a genuine laugh, but does not answer.

The bell rings and with the opening glass door comes the sweeping humidity of American summertimes, along with a young woman who walks past Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo with no hint of recognition. Everybody seems to remember who they were but nobody knows who they are. At least, not in this part of the world, where their names are not ubiquitous but they are not exclusive, either. Nobody adds _the_ at the beginning of their letters and somehow, Leo finds comfort in being boring Mr. Messi. He does not know how to speak English as a native but he remembers the useless things that Kun taught him, such as _como estas is how are you and puta madre is just as bad in English as it is in Spanish_. He has not spoken to Kun in years and his eyes still wet at the thought of his best friend.

“I am here to get my car fixed,” Ronaldo says, suddenly. He does not look at Leo now, and Leo knows that something has changed between them. It seems to be a bad joke; a Portuguese and an Argentine wait in an auto-shop…

“Aren’t we all? Why are you _here_?” Leo pushes. Ronaldo shrugs. He tilts his head back to meet the ugly green couch they sit at. The waiting room buzzes with the dry hum of water dispensers and shifting magazine folds.

“I am tired, Leo. I think I would like to settle down. Not now, but sometime soon, maybe.” In another lifetime, when they were young and still terribly fast, Leo would have looked away. But he feels the stabbing ache in his own bones and does something he never thought he could with Ronaldo; he empathizes. So he tugs at the other man’s slouched posture in a mad rush, a dizzying race towards delayed gratification as if Leo has thought of the most brilliant idea ever. While his skin sagged with age his title did not, and he becomes the little maestro once again without touching a ball.

“Cristiano, come home with me.” Leo’s eyes light up as his words are released and Ronaldo, with his conditioned magnanimity, pulls back one eyelid to stare up at Leo.

“And what? Why should I do that, pulga?” Still, the teasing tone that reveals Ronaldo as an old man and not a retired footballer does not deter Leo from his insisting.

“Leave the world, Cristiano. Come home with me. You have nothing more to prove.” Ronaldo opens his other eye and sits up. He searches Leo’s eyes and finally, lets out an uneven laughter that sounds like something inside has given in to Leo’s madman proposal. In that moment, Leo knows he has won the other man over.

A voice at the front of the shop calls out Ronaldo’s name. The man in white stands. Before he walks away, he turns back with a half-nod.

“Wait for me, pulga. Wait for me.”


End file.
